The current controversy between Great Britain and China regarding the legal status of Hong Kong, having lain dormant for many years, was made explicit by a public exchange of statements between the governments of the two countries during and after the visit to Beijing of British Prime Minister Mrs Margaret Thatcher in September 1982.

How does China promote its military officers? We present a qualitative study on the determinants (connections versus performance) of the selection of military officers. Drawing on 48 in-depth interviews with serving and retired military officers, we argue that the inability of the rule-based personnel system to assess candidate performance (professional competence and political integrity) leads to the rise of the informal institution of guanxi – a Chinese version of personal connections – in promoting military officers. Guanxi both substitutes for and competes with the formal personnel system. Information received through guanxi networks is used by superiors to evaluate subordinates’ professional competence and political integrity. Guanxi is also used by corrupt officers to distort democratic procedures and facilitate the buying and selling of military positions. We conclude that the co-existence of a rule-based personnel system and guanxi leads superiors to promote competent candidates within their guanxi networks.

This paper is intended to serve as a contribution to the study of school textbooks in the People's Republic of China, and, in particular, as a first look at such books since the Cultural Revolution and the death of Chairman Mao Zedong. Because of the nature of the sample it makes no claim to being definitive. But the near-impossibility of obtaining such books abroad and the dominant role they play in the Chinese classroom give the subject some importance.

The gross value of agricultural output in the People's Republic of China increased as much in the eight years from 1978 to 1986 as it did in the 21 years from 1957 to 1978. In per capita terms, the average annual rate of growth rose from 0·4 per cent to 4·8 per cent, the most rapid growth for any comparable period since 1949. How was this dramatic turnaround achieved?

A People's.Daily editorial of 24 August 1989 heralding the early return of students to university campuses, blamed the events of May-June 1989 on students's lack of appreciation of “national essence!” (guoqing) and the fact that bourgeois liberal ideas from the west had flooded in to fill an ideological vacuum created by the lack of serious attention to education in Marxist-Leninist thought on Chinese campuses in recent years. In a long speech given before a national higher education meeting in mid July and published on 30 August, Li Tieying, head of the State Education Commission, specifically linked bourgeois liberalism and what he called “democratic individualism” with “certain courses in the social sciences” that had uncritically introduced bourgeois social theories. The suggested solution to the problem was to strengthen Party leadership on university campuses and reassert political education and education in patriotism and national identity.

The actual response has been much harsher than that. Regular undergraduate enrolments for autumn 1989 were cut from a planned 640,000 to 610,000, with these cuts mainly affecting social science and humanities specializations and national comprehensive universities directly under the State Education Commission. It was these universities which pioneered new work in the social sciences over the past decade, and many of their students took a leading part in the democratic movement. There is thus little subtlety in the attack now being made upon them. To give some specific examples, Fudan's enrolment was cut from a planned 2,000 to 1,200, Nankai's from a planned 1,200 to 800 and Beida's from a planned 2,000 to 800.

The major task of this article is to investigate Taiwan's social changes in the 20th century. The focus is on the social rather than the economic and political dimensions, even though it is very difficult to prevent mentioning Taiwan's economic development miracle as well as recent political democratization. This article mainly discusses how economic and political structures affect social changes, and then explores some impacts of social changes in subsequent political transformation.

This article develops an integrated perspective to study whether formalization can significantly reduce precariousness for informal workers. This perspective combines the analysis of employment dualism with that of rural–urban dualism and the analysis of the production sphere with that of the social reproduction sphere. By applying this integrated framework to the case of a state-owned enterprise (SOE) in China, this article finds that formalization does little to reduce precariousness for the migrant agency workers there. Migrant agency workers in China are in a precarious position not only because of their employment status but also because of their incomplete citizenship and the commodification of social reproduction materials. With the compensation gap between formal and agency workers narrowed primarily owing to the deterioration of formal employment, formalization has little effect on increasing the income of agency workers or alleviating the financial pressure upon them in the sphere of social reproduction; neither can formalization raise migrants up to full citizenship or reduce related precariousness.

During the National Salvation Movement of the mid-1930s, the Shanghai Party forged its most workable alliance not with members of the proletariat but with progressives from the city's middle and upper classes. Making use of multi-class patriotism, Party leaders established a co-operative relationship with members of the elite that became a crucial part of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) resistance work against Japan. In many cases, the relationship continued into the post-war years and contributed significantly to the CCP's easy takeover of the city in May 1949.

The 1946 Constitution of the Republic of China was a product of 13 years' effort by the most liberal elements of the Kuomintang to create a permanent constitution for modern China. The Constitutionalists' goal was to synthesize “autochthonous” norms from the Chinese tradition and modern western liberal values, in accordance with the pre-existing syncretism that Sun Yat-sen had created a generation before. They hoped, thereby, to reach a just balance between the claims of the individual and the claims of the collective in the modern Chinese polity.

In what light does the Communist Party wish to project itself to the people? Is the local party secretary presented as the remote symbol of authoritarian efficiency, a reflection of the absolute power above? Or is he supposed to be a model of the nutrient “helper,” responsive to the people's needs and governed by humanitarian considerations? The actual quality of these relationships is of course inaccessible for direct observation, but we can examine some of the Communist presentations of the image and expectations in officially approved literary publications.

Xiang Jingyu was executed in 1928 at the age of 33 and has since been enshrined as a communist martyr in China. Historically her life is of interest both as the record of an individual woman and of a specific group within a particular generation who embraced Marxism-Leninism as the solution to warlord–imperialist power in China. As a result of her martyrdom, however, it is not easy to separate the actual record of her life from her posthumous persona. This consideration is especially significant with regard to her position in the early Chinese Communist Party, and since she was charged with responsibility for building a communist women's movement, it is equally important in understanding aspects of the woman question in relation to early Party history. Careful examination of Xiang's activities tends to support the conclusion that the women's movement was accorded a low priority and that Xiang's position in the Party reflected this in spite of her posthumous elevation to high status.

This study documents the COVID-19 disease-control measures enacted in rural China and examines the economic and social impacts of these measures. We conducted two rounds of surveys with 726 randomly selected village informants across seven provinces. Strict disease-control measures have been universally enforced and appear to have been successful in limiting disease transmission in rural communities. The infection rate in our sample was 0.001 per cent, a rate that is near the national average outside of Hubei province. None of the villages reported any COVID-19-related deaths. For a full month during the quarantine, the rate of employment of rural workers was essentially zero. Even after the quarantine measures were lifted, nearly 70 per cent of the villagers still were unable to work owing to workplace closures. Although action has been taken to mitigate the potential negative effects, these disease-control measures might have accelerated the inequality between rural and urban households in China.

Appended to this article are two excerpts from Lao She's writings. The first comprises most of a chapter from his first novel; the second is a brief sequence from one of his latest plays. Each is concerned to establish a character, a man who has found his niche in society. Each of these men is quite peripheral to the piece in which he appears, each is a humble creature anxious only to do right by his fellows. On Chao Number Four are lavished all the colourful touches which leap from the brush of a young writer glorying in invention; Wang Jen-te is sketched with the master's economy of line. But the greater contrast appears in the resolution of the two men's respective fates: Chao, pressed down by his own ingenuousness and the cupidity of others into the trough of the “old society” as a beast of burden; Wang Jen-te, proud recipient of a new dignity as chef de cuisine to a People's Commune!

A farm survey conducted in Wuxi county in the 1950s found that the Chinese Communist Party had successfully “preserved the rich peasant economy” in the “newly liberated areas”: the landlords were indeed the only social class whose properties had been redistributed, yet without compromising on the magnitude of benefits received by the poor peasants. A higher land inequality in that region, coupled with an inter-village transfer of land, allowed these dual goals to be achieved. Our study further reveals that class status was determined both by the amount of land a household owned and whether it had committed certain “exploitative acts,” which explains why some landlords did not own a vast amount of land. Conversely, it was the amount of land owned, not class status, that determined redistributive entitlements, which was why 15 per cent of the poor peasants and half of the middle peasants were not redistributed any land.

The China Quarterly Two major factors have continued to impair diplomatic relations between the People’s Republic of China and the Vatican, namely, the so-called “two-China” problem and the independence issue. China regards the Vatican’s diplomatic relations with Taiwan as an infringement of her sovereignty, and insists they are terminated prior to her consideration of a resumption of relations (broken off in 1958) with the Holy See. The Vatican is now the only state in Europe to maintain diplomatic links with Taiwan. Moreover, the Chinese Catholic Church wishes to remain independent of the Pope in Rome. This issue is manifested in the “self-consecration” of bishops in China without seeking the Pope’s prior approval. The “two-China” problem is basically a political and diplomatic one whereas the independence issue has religious as well as political implications. Both China and the Vatican recognize the existence of these two areas of dispute but they differ in their approach towards achieving a possible resolution. China demands that the Vatican should take steps to solve the “two-China” problem before China is ready to discuss the independence question, whereas the Vatican expects China to concede on the latter point first by acknowledging the Pope as the head of the universal Church, before proceeding to discuss other matters, including the status of the Vatican’s diplomatic ties with Taiwan. These different approaches lead to the present stalemate. Each side is expecting the other to take the initiative to overcome the apparent deadlock.

It is now possible to present official Chinese population figures for the end of 1978 and to set them against previous western estimates. In Table I attached to this note columns A and B give the provincial distribution of population in China at the end of 1978. The data therefore refer to the system of provincial boundaries which existed prior to the reorganization of July 1979 in which Inner Mongolia expanded to its pre-1969 configuration at the territorial expense of Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Ningxia and Gansu.

The second half of 1927 is one of the most obscure periods in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. From a large and well-organised force openly playing a major role in the political and military affairs of the country, the Chinese Communist Party rapidly found itself reduced to a few small remnants fighting for their existence. As a result, the printed sources available for future historians were drastically reduced. The Communists cut their output of publications both for lack of the means to produce them, and because it was no longer prudent to reveal even as much about their plans as they had done before. The Nationalist authorities further decimated this scanty output by confiscation and repression. So much of what has been written about this period is based on verbal testimony or secondary sources, and cannot be regarded as altogether reliable.

This article surveys the development of Chinese education within South-East Asian Chinese societies, and briefly relates it to the integration and assimilation of the hua ch'iao into indigenous societies.